


Historical Relevance

by Lindra



Category: Almost Human
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-08
Updated: 2013-12-08
Packaged: 2018-01-03 23:57:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1074570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lindra/pseuds/Lindra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Off a prompt from the Almost Human TV LJ community's prompt challenge. The prompt:</p>
<p>John starts to become curious about Dorian's past and does a little digging. Turns out Dorian had a human partner before he was deactivated (they were part of the pilot scheme that led to the eventual mandatory human/android partnerships). A partner who died. John digs further and finds out that the reason Dorian was deactivated was because of the 'bug' that allowed him to become attached to his partner and how he reacted to the loss of that partner. </p>
<p>Turns out Dorian and John have a lot more in common than John realised...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Historical Relevance

"Are you all so insubordinate?" Dorian asks him. "Detective Stahl actually follows orders and I'm pretty sure she might be the only one, man."

Kennex thinks this is a weird fucking question to ask when they're in the middle of a tower off the comms. Maldonado can't get through. There are no orders.

The real weirdness only occurs to him when they're finished with the job and on their way back down. Maldonado's probably thinking up cusswords. Kennex isn't in a hurry. He's bone-tired and Dorian scared the shit out of him a couple times leaping in all gung-ho by himself like Rudy's going to fix him up forever. 

Kennex's partner is an asshole. They're all assholes. Assholes.

Thinking about it like that doesn't even hurt that much.

"You've been active a month," Kennex says. Of course Dorian's going to pick up on what he means. He can't keep Dorian in the dark for shit. "You've met Paul." That dick.

Dorian's lights go funny, and if Kennex didn't know better, from Dorian's face he'd think he was interrogating a witness the wrong way, again, and not asking his partner a question.

"Hey," Kennex says. More like a warning. They've still got like eighteen floors to go yet and the leg's whining and if Dorian spaces out now Kennex doesn't trust himself not to punch him.

"I observe," Dorian says, and smiles at him, crooked like usual but the eyes are flat like Kennex just called him synthetic again. He can't help it, it just slips out, but he didn't actually do it this time and he's kind of at a complete fucking loss when Dorian clams up the rest of the way down and just listens to Maldonado's cussing like it wasn't Kennex dragging him along.

He does just fine complaining about Kennex to Kennex's face. It's not like Maldonado's going to put him back in storage. But he just stands there like a lump, his cheek flashing blue. He thinks he catches Dorian nodding along to Maldonado's "so fucking irresponsible" lecture when Kennex tunes out. Asshole.

Kennex drags him to the noodle bar and makes him watch Kennex eat. Dorian doesn't even snark. 

It's fucking unsettling. "What?"

"I don't know why I said that," Dorian says. "You're the only loose cannon around here, man."

Kennex wants to believe that tone. Dorian's ... whatever, really isn't his problem. He makes himself let it go, but it's a close call.

Couple cases later and Dorian's talking to Detective Stahl. She's laughing, actually, and Kennex's wary that it's about the dating profile again, but it's --

He blinks.

It's worse.

"Back then," Dorian says, "we'd be fixing bugs all day, you and me."

"The systems have been pretty well ironed out," Stahl agrees. She's holding coffee but it's not her usual mug. It's paper from outside. "I can't imagine the error rate when you first started."

Kennex is only two hours late today. The leg was acting up. It's not his fucking fault. But he wonders what the hell happened to start up the nostalgia because as far as he knows, Dorian doesn't do nostalgia. He doesn't have nostalgia. Blank fucking slate.

Right?

He waits until Dorian's gone to get Stahl more coffee -- how the fuck did he get partnered with a suck-up? -- and sidles up to her. Sneaks. Creeps. All right, he limps, the cubicles aren't that fucking tall, he's not perfect.

"How long ago was this?"

She turns like she was expecting him. Kennex is pretty sure she and Maldonado are in cahoots. It's the only explanation why they'd both look at him like that. "In your dad's day. The first androids in the pilot program were DRNs." She pauses. "You might not want to look into it. I know you're going to, but at least think about not doing it."

Kennex smells a rat and, damnit, he's curious. "You know I'm going to ask Rudy."

"Poor Rudy," Stahl says, sipping her coffee.

Kennex's pretty sure he's just been insulted.

Rudy isn't any nicer to him. "That's really -- it's been a while, dude."

Kennex sighs at him. Rudy doesn't seem to mind when Kennex sighs at him, not really, even if he tries to make himself look bigger with his eyebrows when Kennex interrupts him. Rudy's about as threatening as kittens. "So tell me what you remember."

"I dunno, dude. It just didn't work out. Like, the Synthetic Soul program, it's just ..." Kennex didn't expect Rudy to look so damn guilty. Bored, yeah. Dismissive, sure. Tell him to get the fuck out of his workshop, yeah.

This is something else, and Kennex wants to poke at it until it coughs up. Wants to. But he likes Rudy, sort of, and that face isn't a witness face hiding something important, it's a convict trying to turn their life around face.

"Did you write the program?" Kennex says.

Rudy flinches. "No. Well. Sort of. I learned from the girl that did. Debugging, you know. Prototypes. She was, uh, she was -- you know, we didn't set out to make them human. That wasn't the point. Human-like. We wanted them to interact with people and learn on their own without having to reprogram them all the time. We wanted people to be comfortable with them. We spent so much time developing lint-free skin and so much time working on appropriate emotional reactions. We didn't think about what we were doing. Really doing." Rudy grimaces, skin thin around his eyes. "That was, um, that was stupid. We were really stupid, dude. So stupid."

Rudy goes back to fiddling with the synthetic's head on the table, mouth drawn deep down, whispering the way he does when Kennex hurts him but he doesn't want Kennex to know. "You shouldn't ask me about this, okay?"

So Kennex does the next best thing and goes to Maldonado.

She stares at him for a long time.

"Wondered when you were going to ask."

That is just unfair. "It's not like I know anything about synthetics," he protests.

"You didn't think why your dad didn't want one?"

He scowls. "Same reason I didn't. It's not the same."

Maldonado shakes her head. "Yeah, it's not the same. It was, once. Back when they first started on the idea. The androids were so damn close to human you couldn't tell. That's why the blue lights, the rings in their eyes. People couldn't stand not knowing. We expected the humans to get attached. We didn't expect the androids to get attached right back." She's flat and level and Kennex has the inkling that he's listening to things way above clearance. "Really attached."

Kennex groans. "Don't tell me they sexbotted them."

She slaps her hand down on her desk. "Get your head out the gutter." She's furious, actually, enough that Kennex clears his throat and tries to look like he'll behave himself.

It takes a while. She doesn't trust him. She's probably right not to.

"There was some of that. But that's not what I'm talking about. Compared to everything, that wasn't even on the radar. I'm talking about attached enough that when their partners died, they reacted like humans. Worse than humans. You think you've seen crazy? You think you were crazy when you lost your partner? You didn't walk right through a lake. You haven't seen an android try to cry. They don't have tear ducts. They didn't have the processing power to get over it. But they tried and it made them worse. We had to deactivate them. All of them."

She nods out the door at Dorian. Dorian, who has his lip curled just a little while Paul condescends at him. There's going to be a time when he has even the flimsiest excuse to slug Paul, and he's going to take it and run with it so fast Paul won't even see the wall. 

"Look at you," Maldonado says, and Kennex swings back to her,, on the defensive and unsure why.

He doesn't like not knowing why the look on her face makes him feel judged as all hell. "What?"

"You're not paying attention," she says. For Maldonado her tone is downright mild.

Kennex puts the pieces together so fast he almost gives himself whiplash. "His partner died."

"Mmm." She nods out the door again. "Go."

Kennex went. "Stay," he tells Dorian as he passes. "Gonna do something."

"Do what?"

"Something private!"

He can hear Dorian winding up for a dirty joke when he shuts the door on him and finds the lift down to the forgotten files. Even back in his dad's day they kept paper. Half of it got digitised, but only the half they wanted. Nobody ever wants a permanent accessible record of a fuckup that big, and Kennex's banking on that.

He hits paydirt after three hours of digging. Five filing cabinets, shoved in a dark corner and left there, and he's covered in dirt and dust and dried shit by the time he reaches them.

DRN, the faded labels say in someone's post-cursive print, and it's worth it just for the chance to know. It’s all going to be worth it, he’s sure. It has to be. Dorian’s too much of a goddamn mystery.

DRN-AF-1-0037 is the first picture he sees, and he has to suck in a breath. It isn't Dorian. But the eerie attitude is the same, the tiny wrongness around the eyes. As far as he can figure out DRNS were assembled in batches, their bodies and skins copied from live models, a thousand per model. Enough diversity to be trusted by anyone who wanted to talk to and work with something like their own face.

Twenty tiny records of people who weren’t human but were sort of people anyway on every page with identically useless stats. Height, weight, visual age, clothing size according to the Euro standards. The numbers slowly ascend as he combs back through the folders, sweeping his arm to the shoulder against the metal back of the cabinet just in case somebody got clever and taped some kind of explanation back there. It’s something his dad would’ve done.

Somebody, less than a decade ago, took the time to organise all this before it got packed off to the shame corner, and whoever it was deserved a goddamn medal. Kennex wouldn't have had the patience. A human wouldn't have had the patience.

If it was an android, a DRN patiently filing away all this before it was deactivated, was that the last thing it did? Lock up all the records that it'd even existed?

Kennex knows when he's setting himself up for a good brood, and this is so not the fucking time. He’ll think about it later. He’ll think about all of this later.

He flicks through four cabinets, cursing the fact that he can't tell Dorian about any of this and get him to take a look instead so he won't have to go through this bullshit, before he finds what he's looking for.

This entire run of thousand is Dorian, his Dorian’s face, and he pulls out the wad of folders and sits on the floor, spreading out the papers and looking for anything that's crumpled or looks like it'd been shelved in a hurry.

One sheet, just one, is dogeared.

Kennex pulls it out. There's a coffee stain. Bingo. No android, even Dorian, would do that to information. A human brooded over this, and behind it are a bunch of sheets detailing DRN-YE-7-0287. Nothing special, except it’s the most information about any one android he’s seen so far, and he’s just combed through thousands of tiny postage-stamp factory reports.

Most of the first page is stats -- missions completed, assignments, injury rates, competencies. Dorian spent three years as a police officer. Three years with one partner. 

One line near the bottom of that completely fucking normal front page (like any profile, if Dorian were human) screams in bold: PARTNER DECEASED 04/05/2033 and then in faded red scribble: SEE ATTACHED.

The rest is mental health evaluations. Therapy. Part of it's transcripted, and the familiar sarcastic "man" leaps off the page at him. Yeah, this is his Dorian. Kennex skips to the back, like he does with every book he isn’t sure he wants to waste his time reading, and the last page just says in black text unlabelled and unsigned:

> DRN-YE-0287 DEACTIVATED 14/11/2033 AS PART OF DRN LINE DEACTIVATION TO BE COMPLETED BY 15/11/2033  
>  DRN LINE DEACTIVATION DUE TO UNFORESEEN FLAWS IN EMPATHIC ASPECT OF SYNTHETIC SOUL VERSION 3.05.87 COMPLETED 16/11/2033
> 
> AUTHORISED RUDY LOM  
>  12/11/2033

Kennex's amusement at all this fucking therapy wasted on an android dies a fiery death. 

Rudy. The poor, miserable fucker.

Kennex flips back, reads all the shit he skipped past, and when he's done -- well, when he’s done he just stares at the ticking time bomb he's got in his hands. The one he's been fucking saddled with. Maldonado fucking saddled him with this bullshit.

No wonder they call Dorian one of the crazy ones. He had gone crazy. They said it was a bug in the programming, unforeseen flaw and all, but really he'd just gone fucking nuts.

Maldonado hadn't been kidding about the walking into a lake part. Dorian was damn near suicidal in the sessions, going on and on about how he didn't have any point anymore, there wasn't any reason for him to keep existing when his partner was gone. He fancied it up with words like synergy and adaptation and empathetic circuits but it was just grief.

It'd driven him crazy. He'd attacked his new partner. They'd tried two, and he'd killed them both. Other DRNs with injured or deceased long-term partners were behaving similarly, the notes said, but this one was the worst affected and easiest to study. Easiest to try to fix. 

But it didn’t work out. None of it worked out. Calibration failed. Recalibration failed. Memory erasure failed. Subcircuit removal failed. Restructuring failed. Altered consciousness failed. Bug detection failed. Flaw detection failed. Every attempt signed off by Rudy, and every attempt a big fat failure to save Dorian. To save all of them.

Kennex is starting to get the dim awareness that he's been an enormous dick to Rudy where Dorian’s concerned, enough that he tastes shame and Kennex isn't a guy who fucking does shame. Guilt. Not shame.

The problem, reading between the therapist's lines of bullshit and concern and warnings, was that the programming worked too well. Grief wasn't a bug, just the end result of the program being perfect.

Kennex thinks about that for a while. 

The program was perfect. 

The program, Dorian's program, is perfect. They made a humanlike android, and it worked so well that they needed fucking indicators to tell them apart from humans.

He thinks about it for a good long fucking while, all that feeling and camaraderie and sass until his stomach and leg complain. He makes up his mind. Kennex makes up his mind and that’s that -- it’s done. And this is done. All of it, it’s done. This isn’t relevant anymore.

He puts everything back, smashes the cabinets and tests all the drawers to make sure they don’t open, drags everything back in front of them, and breaks the lock on the door. It’ll keep snoopers out for a while. No-one comes down here anyway. No-one except Kennex being too curious for his own good.

So what if the program's perfect? So what if androids can mourn?

Dorian's Kennex's partner and like hell if Kennex is going anywhere. Like hell.

Like goddamn hell.


End file.
